Commercial potato processors typically prepare frozen processed strips by washing and sometimes peeling whole potatoes, inspecting the whole potatoes to trim defects and sort them if necessary, cutting the whole potatoes into strips, and then subjecting the strips to additional processing and freezing steps. Institutional and business customers, such as fast food restaurants, who purchase the frozen potato strips from the potato processor typically prepare the strips by frying them in oil and serve them to customers as french fries. Fast food restaurants and other purveyors of french fries often require the packaged frozen potato strips to meet exacting length or “count” specifications which limit the number of “short” strips allowed per pound as well as the number of “long” strips allowed per pound. Short strips are strips shorter than a specified length, and long strips are strips longer than a specified length. Long strips are produced when unusually long potatoes (exceeding six or seven inches, for example) are sliced into strips by a strip cutter, such as a “water gun.”
Fast food restaurants and many other french fry purveyors view long strips as undesirable because they adversely affect serving yield and do not fit well in disposable serving containers sized to hold strips of shorter length. Commercial potato processors also view long strips as undesirable because they are more prone to break during processing and shipping and may be crushed during packing if the length exceeds the headspace of the packing enclosure. Traditionally, commercial processors have controlled the number of long potatoes in the conveyor line by having inspectors manually pull long potatoes at the trimming station, cut the potatoes into halves or thirds and then return the cut pieces to the moving conveyor line.
More recently, two commercial systems have been introduced to provide a more automated solution to the problems associated with long potatoes. The Farmco Division of Key Technology offers a commercial cutting system in which whole potatoes are transferred to one of a series of flights mounted on an endless, steeply inclined (almost upright) conveyor. The conveyor is tilted away from vertical to keep the potatoes from rolling off the conveyor belt. Each flight conveys a single potato upwardly toward a rotating but otherwise fixed cutting blade. The blade has a horizontal axis of rotation and rotates in a vertical plane aligned with the center of the conveyor bolt. Spring-biased fingers engage opposite ends of the potato as it approaches the blade to keep its midsection generally aligned with the cutting edge of the blade. The flight conveys the potato upwardly into cutting engagement with the blade, which cuts the potato in half transversely. Each flight is split into two sections, with a gap therebetween, to permit the sections to pass on either side of the blade as the potato is sliced.
GME, Inc. offers an automated commercial potato cutting system having a generally horizontal “U” shaped trough with a longitudinal slot in the bottom. The slot allows longitudinally spaced paddles in the trough to be mounted to an endless conveyor chain underlying the trough. The paddles advance the potatoes in the trough, one by one, to a cutting station. At the cutting station, a pivotally mounted swing blade is actuated to slice the advancing potato in half crosswise as the blade swings forward across the path of the potato or, alternatively, into thirds as the blade slices the advancing potato on its forward swing and then again on its backswing. A sensor upstream of the cutting station apparently senses the length of the potato and transmits the length data to a controller which determines when to actuate the blade to intersect the path of the moving potato and whether to actuate the blade to cut the potato roughly into halves with one cut or into thirds with two cuts.
In the commercial potato industry there remains a need for a durable commercial proportional length cutting system having a simple construction, more precise cutting action and capacity to flexibly cut potatoes or the like into a broad range of proportional lengths, and yet is able to operate efficiently, reliably and consistently in a continuous, demanding high production commercial operation.